Provocative, disruptive and re-orientating approaches to sports coaching research

ABSTRACT

This paper originates from my personal struggles and dissatisfaction with the unproblematic treatment of methodologies, politics, and procedures of doing sports coaching research. In response, I offer a radical counternarrative where I apply disruptive and unorthodox guiding principles of postmodern thought and approaches to fieldwork, analysis, and writing. Although these approaches have received some attention in general sports scholarship (Munslow, 2012; Rail, 1998; Thorpe, 2012), incorporating a full commitment to postmodernist approaches to sports coaching research is still gaining traction. By way of contribution, I have used postmodernism as both a sensibility, and as a set of orientating principles that influences my thinking and encourage a rigorous reflexivity that creates novel ways through which to consider both the research process, and the process of knowledge creation in sports coaching research. I offer these reflections as an illustration of how postmodernism could be adopted as a scaffold for others.

KEYWORDS:

• Sports coaching
• postmodernism
• postmodernist approaches
• methodology

Acknowledgments

I would like to give my sincere thanks to Dr Charlie Corsby and the reviewers for their invaluable insights and practical advice on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Their commentary has lifted my paper and added rigour to which I am grateful.

Disclosure statement

Research carried out by the authors that helped inform the paper was part funded by the Cluster for Research into Coaching (CRiC).

Notes

1. As Sarup (1993, p. 144) wryly observes, “There are so many similarities between poststructuralist theories and postmodernist practices that it is difficult to make a clear distinction between them”. Indeed, due to their shared onto-epistemologies, musing on the notion of “truth”, the politicisation of research itself, appropriate judgement criteria used and their approach to doing and writing up research, they are often used interchangeably in sports coaching research, as well as in broader qualitative research (Markula & Silk, 2011). In this paper, I use both together to represent a paradigm. When I use them singularly, I am specifically emphasising them as either a theoretical lens (poststructuralism) or as a sensibility and guidance to methodology (postmodernism).

2. Scope: postmodernism is a broad church and cultural paradigm, bridging many disciplines, whereas poststructuralism has a narrower focus being grounded in academic debate, rather than culture and concerned with critical theory. Time frames and origin: postmodernism developed in 1960s New York, where it dissolved boundaries between high and low culture, whilst poststructuralism has its roots in European avant-garde in critical theory 20 years earlier. Genealogy: postmodernism takes it point of departure from modernism, whereas poststructuralism stands in critical relation to structuralism. Approach: postmodernism is a sensibility, a state of mind that deconstructs metanarratives, compared to poststructuralism which reveals power relations on which the reproduction of modern society depends (Rosenau, 1992; Sarup, 1993).

3. Throughout my PhD I created several Reflexive Logbooks to develop my critical consciousness. As a postmodern device I have used these extracts as data to enrich my work. Specifically, these approaches have allowed me to engage in a critical dialectical conversation with my reading and research, my changing position, and emergent ways of thinking. In this way, viewing writing both as a research endeavour and by writing oneself into the text is essential to developing a postmodern position. By choosing examples that exposes the vulnerabilities, uncertainties, tensions and/or paradoxes of doing qualitative research can the reflexively aware researcher move beyond most humanist/interpretivist practices involving reflection.

4. These diary extracts are useful in helping me making sense of the shifting power dynamics of this contested field of action and to analyse what this might mean.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Cluster for Research into Coaching (CRiC).